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Dawers: Savannah arena debate sparks misplaced crime concerns

After the Savannah City Council recently reaffirmed its commitment to a westside site for a new arena, a veritable flood of comments on Facebook and various online forums questioned or condemned the decision.

Assuming that neighborhoods in west Savannah have a lot of crime, a large number of critics raised issues of public safety.

That prompted me to take a close look at maps of crime reports over the past year.

It’s a pretty simple process. Just go to the website RAIDS Online (http://www.raidsonline.com), where you can generate detailed maps for all crime reports or for individual reports. From there, you can generate a heat map showing the density of crime in various areas.

Before I can go any farther, it’s worth noting that Savannah has a lot of crime. No area is immune.

I generated a lot of maps, all of which told a similar story.

West Savannah has considerably less crime than many other parts of town.

The various maps clearly show that crime is most common in a broad swath of the core of the city. The Landmark Historic District lights up on the map, and crime worsens further south before decreasing again on the other side of 37th Street.

There’s another fairly high crime area even further south that really stands out if you sort the map to count only theft and various property crimes. That big red dot on the map is Oglethorpe Mall.

Ironically, there are more crimes in the neighborhood of the current arena than anywhere in west Savannah. There are more reports east of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard than west of it.

In case you’re suspicious of flawed or inconsistent crime reporting, I even generated a map looking just for motor vehicle theft and homicide, which are two of the crimes most likely to be reported and least likely to be downgraded to lesser crimes.

That map tells pretty much the same story.

So why are neighborhoods in west Savannah being maligned so much by people who might live in neighborhoods with even more crime?

Blight and poverty might lead to some wrong assumptions, and of course there are racial issues in play too.

But I think the problem primarily has to do with geography. Many Savannahians seem to have little firsthand knowledge of neighborhoods that are right down the road.

Take the arena debate, for example.

I keep hearing how the site is “in the middle” of a ghetto.

Not even close. The site isn’t “in the middle” of anything. It’s a stretch of no man’s land just west of downtown. It has virtually no neighbors at all.